Rosamond Lehmann: A Life [Hardcover]

I bought this book knowing nothing about Rosamond Lehmann, but knowing the most essential thing about her biographer - that she writes wonderfully.

I now know that Rosamond Lehmann was born the day after Queen Victoria's funeral; that she was a novelist; that her love-life was eventful and a bit of a mess; and that she had endearing qualities which made up for a rather alarming egotism. She was also very beautiful. For much of her life she was under the influence of the atheist/agnostic culture of the Bloomsbury Group, but later became deeply involved in spiritualism.

It would be nice if publishers could be a bit more generous with photographs. The ones included are fascinating - in particular Rosamond on a motorbike sandwiched between one of her husbands and his gay best friend - but one would like to be able to put a face to every significant character.

I am unlikely to rush out and buy the collected works. I finished this book with only the mildest inclination to read any of Rosamond's purple prose, but with my veneration for her biographer absolutely intact.

From the first time I read Rosamond Lehmann's earliest novel `Dusty Answer', decades ago now, I have loved her writing and couldn't resist buying this biography, even though I've never been a great fan of the genre. Then I kept it for several years before I got round to reading it, but when I did, I found it fascinating and just had to keep reading.

I hadn't realised that Miss Lehmann died as recently (relatively speaking) as 1990 or that she lived until she was 90. Nor did I realise, until I read the Afterword, that her biographer, Selina Hastings, knew her as a friend. This goes some way to explaining the depth of detail about Rosamond Lehmann's feelings, which is what makes this biography so special. Even if you don't like her at times, she seems like someone you know quite well.

It's long and closely printed but an easy read - an engaging insight into a life led to the full, with all its joys, disappointments, and grief. From her early childhood with her sisters and brother John, with whom she maintained a close though sometimes stormy relationship throughout her life, through her days at Cambridge, to the loneliness of her last years, the book describes the ups and downs of her marriages, her affairs, and her friendships. Always demanding and possessive, she eventually stifled the love of many she held most dear but she nevertheless maintained close friendships with numerous well-known personalities. At times it seemed as if she was an inveterate name-dropper, but she knew many of those mentioned well enough to spend evenings and weekends with them or they with her and was often influenced by their beliefs and disbeliefs. I can't imagine being on such friendly terms with so many great literary figures, from VirginiaWoolf and the `Bloomsbury Set', Lytton Strachey, Stephen Spender, and Siegfried Sassoon, to Laurie Lee, and Cecil Day Lewis, with whom she had an affair that lasted for nine years. Unable to accept that her own behaviour might have been largely to blame for his eventual desertion, she never forgave him for what she saw as his cruel abandonment of her.

Thoroughly enjoyable!

Rosamond Lehmann turned out (until her last novel, at least), beautiful, clear prose, elegant dissections of upper and upper-middle-class life. This won her acclaim abroad as well as in England (she was particularly popular in France, where Simone de Beauvoir was a big fan). But her private life was increasingly chaotic. At Cambridge, where both she and her sister Helen were students (quite remarkable in itself, bearing in mind the general attitude to women's education in the early 20th century), she fell for a charming Etonian, who played her along for a bit before marrying someone else. This distraction stopped her getting the First she had been predicted. On the rebound, she married Leslie Runciman, member of a prosperous family who worked in shipping, and went to live with him in the North of England. Though Leslie was devoted to her, they had little in common, and he had various neuroses including a horror of becoming a father (he forced Rosamond to abort their child). Rosamond wrote her first two novels during this marriage, and began to receive acclaim, to Leslie's pride. However, their married life did not improve, and after a few years Rosamond ran away with a mutual friend, Wogan Phillips. Wogan had artistic aspirations (he was a painter, apparently not very good!) and for a while the pair were very happy. They had two children, to whom Rosamond was devoted. But after a few years the marriage began to turn sour. Both had affairs, Rosamond with Goronwy Rees, a journalist and academic who she met via Elizabeth Bowen - Bowen accused Rosamond of pinching her potential lover. Things worsened when Wogan went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War and returned a committed Communist, despite his aristocratic background. His father disowned him, and he and Rosamond decided to separate. Rosamond then entered into a passionate relationship with the married, and seemingly utterly selfish Cecil Day-Lewis, who decided to split his time between her and his wife. Endlessly promising to marry Rosamond, Cecil never quite got round to divorcing his wife Mary, and in the end left both women for the much younger actress Jill Balcon. Rosamond (whose increasing tantrum-throwing and scenes may have had something to do with Cecil leaving her) never forgave him. She sought consolation for a while with a much younger lover (a friend of her son's) but never again had a long-term partner. As she moved towards old age, tragedy and disappointments made her increasingly eccentric and tyrannical. Her daughter Sally died tragically in her twenties, and Rosamond became obsessed with spiritualism, spending hours in apparent dialogue with Sally (and creating a horribly sickly view of Heaven at the same time). She grew grotesquely fat due to her love of sweet food. However, her love of literature remained intact, and those who dealt with her professionally - such as Carmen Callil, who oversaw the reprinting of her novels by Virago - spoke of her with great affection.

Selina Hastings makes Lehmann - interesting, vibrant, spoilt, temperamental, at times very kind and at others very difficult - a compelling character. She writes beautifully about her books, making you want to go out and buy them immediately (apart from 'A Sea-Grape Tree', acknowledged by most to be Lehmann's poorest). She also brings the world in which Lehmann lived vividly to life, showing what a good friend Lehmann could be, and painting deft portraits of some of her friends, who included Virginia Woolf, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Carmen Callil. Lehmann's remarkable siblings Beatrix and John are also well-depicted. as are Lehmann's husbands, with some of the material about 'Comrade' Wogan gloriously funny. There's not a chapter in the book where the tension sags. Even when Lehmann is behaving at her most appallingly you want to go on reading to see what will happen next. And it's all credit to Hastings that she manages to make the final section, when Lehmann became an increasingly difficult old woman, still enjoyable; though I agree with reviewers who note that it might have been better to concentrate very slightly more on Lehmann's work for literature and a little less on her crotchety behaviour, love of rich desserts and spiritualist obsession.

A very impressive account of a 20th century novelist who (unlike quite a lot of Virago authors) has always remained in fashion. I have Hastings's book on Nancy Mitford to read next and am much looking forward to it.